


Minutes

by RurouniHime



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Dean Winchester Needs a Hug, Don't copy to another site, Dreams, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, Love Confessions, M/M, Post-Episode: s15e18 Despair, Post-Episode: s15e19 Inherit the Earth, Requited Love, Sexual Content, Sexuality Crisis, but more a crisis of worth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:27:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27567481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: He gets up. He finds his other other phone. He drives.The whole time after, it’s like waiting. For the sky to fall, for the other shoe to drop, for the nightmare to end. He doesn’t know how to define this odd, light sense of impermanence, of feeling… not really real. The world, barren and quiet, has this sheen to all its edges, and he’s standing outside it, staring in and thinking, those poor bastards.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 44
Kudos: 387





	Minutes

**Author's Note:**

> I love this fandom. I don't usually write in it. But I had to. Oh my Jack, how I had to.
> 
> Thank you to coffeejunkii for the swift and fantastic beta. As always, you are a wonderful and indulgent friend to me. <3

He sleeps, when sleep wins, and he dreams of Cas.

**

“Look at the stars.” Cas smells smoky, heavy like two AM darkness. He fills Dean’s nostrils with sandalwood and dried marijuana leaves. “Are you—you’re not looking.”

“I _am.”_ Dean laughs, because Cas, struggling upright from flipped tortoise, indignant, drowning in tunic—no, he should always be supine, stretched long and limber with half-hooded eyes and the suggestion of a smile. As an angel, he understood fathoms, but Dean thinks, now that Cas is mortal, here against the jagged and broken skyscrapers and the city being swallowed by grass, he is actually—truly—all-knowing.

“Oh. Then that.” Cas crawls around the dying fire, falls beside him in a heap and a sigh, lifting one arm for Dean to sight along into the heavens. The stars are fierce, sickle-white and blade-blue, and there are _so many_ of them. “That’s where I lived.”

Cas is warm against Dean’s side, ribs expanding with every breath. Somewhere in the compound beyond, someone laughs, up late with their own fire, their own stories. Dean thinks of Lucifer, of Sammy’s skin, of brothers, sisters, siblings of another kind woven together out here by death and fear and love and trust and free will, smelling of campfire, body odor, rusty water, pine sap, and he’s not looking at the stars at all, but at Cas’s face: a cheek grained with stubble, so close Dean could just raise his own chin and they would touch.

“Where, that big old empty spot?” he says into expectant silence, only to have a splayed palm smack down onto his sternum. _“Oof.”_

“It didn’t look like that, up there,” Cas huffs. “Jerk.” His hand remains on Dean’s chest, rising and falling. His thumbnail is stained on one side, the rolling of herbs day in and day out. Dean imagines he can see the ubiquitous smoke curling like dragons’ tails from Cas’s nose, the scent of turned earth worked deep into the fibers of Cas’s clothes, and if they die tomorrow or the next day or the month after, none of that will ever touch the ember-glow of their fire tonight or the monstrous spray of stars above or the damp grass at Dean’s back.

He inhales deeply and holds it.

“Stop thinking,” Cas says, dry as bones.

 _Stop making me think,_ Dean thinks, watching Cas’s profile: chin, ear, jaw, brow, temple, eyelashes. A new scar, smooth and white at the corner of his eye. “Too busy to think.”

“What, busy lazing?”

Dean scoffs. “Not as lazy as you.”

“That hurts me, Dean.”

“Truth hurts.”

“You know,” Cas says, and the corner of his mouth flickers, “one man’s lazing is another man’s planning.”

“So you _are_ planning to hotbox Satan to death.”

“O _ho,_ fearless _leader—”_

Dean sets fear aside, again, turns Cas’s face by the chin, and kisses his mouth. Everything about Cas—about the fucked up, torn up world, really—is still except for Cas’s mouth, and this night is endless, wet, full of busted buildings and broken people, and Dean kisses Cas because he wants to. Has wanted to. Always wants to. Cas kisses him back, slow and heady as the weed he smokes, his mouth a perfect fit to Dean’s, as he always is. Dean thinks this is the kind of forever angels can never understand: the shudder-jolt-stop of a single moment, a moment on repeat, the tremble of asking, again, and being answered, again, and Cas is as human as he is but still knows how to pick and strum at Dean’s chilly, tired body the best of anyone. 

Later, the fire will go out completely, and the voices across the way will force them to silence their sounds as best they can, and Cas will shake out a ratty blanket that he’ll wrap them in, sweat and steaming breath and all. But now is earthy and slow and tomorrow couldn’t matter less.

**

He wakes, to soft bedding, to brick walls and a vinyl collection in the corner, a dark oak door, and it breaks him.

**

That day, his phone rang and rang. _Sam. Sam. Sam._ Maybe if he’d known that everyone outside was gone, he would have answered. 

“I need a minute.” He says it to the space where Cas stood. The basement in the bunker is dry and musty in his throat. “Just… need a fucking minute.” 

The phone shuts off. Rings again. Dean presses the heels of his hands to his eyes until everything glows white, like an angel flying in. The why of Cas saying those things…Of course there’s a why. It’s not worth asking aloud. How could there not be a why? He’s Dean; why would anyone think any of those things about him?

“Cas?” The name drops to the stones. He said it, almost the last thing before Cas d—He jerks away from the word, and the scrape of his own boots on the floor is loud because this place has always been a tomb. “No.” He rubs his face again, and shakes his head, clearing the cobwebs that keep trying to grow. “No, no, no, no, no, no,” like an eyeroll, a restart, a project he fucked up but can put right if he just shakes loose, but the last _no_ doesn’t cooperate, catches on its way out and breaks in half, and his lungs heave, and the phone rings _again,_ and he throws it, and weeps helplessly into his palms for a while.

How is he supposed to do this? How do people do this? There’s something about it that feels like hell, in the quieter moments when the physical torture was set aside and all he had was himself for hours, years, eons, the sensation that he belonged there, would have gone there even had he not dealt for Sammy’s life. Then, he couldn’t speak. Like now, there was nothing he knew to say.

“You ask _me,_ Cas,” he grits into the darkness. “Next time, you damn well ask me first.”

_What would you have answered?_

He knows, and it makes the hell worse. He wouldn’t have answered. He hadn’t answered, had he? All had been confusion, a ridiculous, muddled, impossible bewilderment, all he’d thought was haze and sharp light, Cas’s words as they kept coming, the fucking end as it raced closer and closer, the sting of compliments he had long since accepted would never apply to him, and _no,_ he’d never thought about them _specifically,_ the things Cas said, but as he’d said them, Dean had recognized them as strangers, alien, foreign; beautiful intimacies meant for people like the mom and the dad of his early childhood, but not for him. 

He draws a breath. He thinks of himself, he tries, as Cas had done, and feels disgust for what he sees. No, those were not for _him._

“Oh god, Cas,” he breathes out, sad to his bones.

He wouldn’t have answered. In some hallway or some hotel room, in the twilight of a gas station lot, he would have turned his eyes away. Cleared his throat. Found his way around it back to more comfortable terrain, throat stuffed full and heart slamming into his ribcage, silently and desperately signaling for the awkwardness to be abandoned in the gloom of a conversation that was just too… too incisive to have more than once. He would have pushed and prodded, puttied things back into their normal shape as best he could. He would have gone on, with a silent Cas following behind, and in the back of his mind, as he lay in the dark waiting for sleep to swing down from whatever ceiling was above him, _then_ he would have wondered. When it was safe to wonder.

The phone rings.

Moments ago, Cas stood there. Ten feet from his own feet. Dean’s jacket lies heavily, especially across his left shoulder, an anvil he has no idea how to take hold of and move to a better, stronger place on his body that can bear the weight, like his back or his arms. He wipes his face. Wipes it again. He can’t remember ever crying like this, such an ugly, painful swell of tears and raw throat. 

He couldn’t have answered. The world itches to turn, lurching and violent, toward a Dean he has suspected was there but never looked at head on before. Whole moments later, he still doesn’t have the words he would need. 

“You didn’t _ask_ me,” he begs of the room. 

No one hears.

**

He gets up. He finds his other other phone. He drives.

The whole time after, it’s like waiting. For the sky to fall, for the other shoe to drop, for the nightmare to end. He doesn’t know how to define this odd, light sense of impermanence, of feeling… not really real. The world, barren and quiet, has this sheen to all its edges, and he’s standing outside it, staring in and thinking, those poor bastards. 

Even the dog, even Michael, Lucifer—none of it makes a true dent. Dean’s ears feel slightly muffled, his vision just a little too bright. It’s bad, it’s the definition of bad, but it’s not his world. He’s not in this play. The plot hasn’t wound to its conclusion, because at its conclusion, things will turn and be made right. They always are. They always find a way, don’t they?

Those _poor_ bastards.

**

He sleeps, when sleep wins.

**

When Cas touches him, bare fingers to bare skin, Dean jumps, full-bodied. His head lifts from the pillow, his hands clench around the bulge of triceps. His knees bend further, caging an angel.

The hotel room is dark, past midnight, and Cas’s blue eyes shine like electrodes. It’s otherworldly. 

Dean thumbs the corner of Cas’s eye. “Do you know you’re doing that?”

Cas’s eyes dim. “Sorry,” he says, gruff in the new dark.

Dean hauls in a breath, grieving the loss of that light. His body is alive in ways he’s never felt. His skin almost hurts. His heart races, thump-thump-thump in his ears. There was a time, once, when he never could have imagined this. Never looked it in the face and thought it would one day happen. Angels are not for human lust. Angels are beyond, apart, above that. 

Except. “Don’t… be sorry.”

The sense of Cas is larger than this room, cold and searing all at once, like a black hole and an icy lake, like falling into the sun. Dean shuts his eyes and feels it on his skin: soporific heat, a creature so much bigger than he is, could ever hope to be, a being with razor focus and endless awareness, and all of it sinking into _his_ flesh, flooding over _his_ bones.

He’s just Dean Winchester. Small. Frail. A pinprick in a vast sky full of stars. The idea that Castiel, Angel of the Lord, wants him, could see him in this very human light, would pull himself endlessly inward into a shape that fits Dean’s limited capacity for sensation just…just to _be_ with him…

“It’s just.” Cas shifts above him, warm on the insides of his thighs and raspy against his chest. “There are things I think I can’t hold in. Like this.”

He takes Cas’s face in both hands, cradles it. Looks into his eyes until Cas is looking back. _“Don’t_ be sorry,” he repeats, and it sounds even to him like a knell. A closing note.

Cas’s eyes flare back into blue, beautiful light.

And it’s heat. _Heat._ Like he can’t describe. And it’s motion and friction and half-finished words too, like it always is, but this is more. More, and more, whole swathes of his own body he had no idea he had, and inside, under his flesh and deep down in the muscle and sinew, sometimes he feels like he might burn alive. He feels Cas against him. Over him. In him. And he feels like he can see Cas’s wings glittering in the dark, lifting rhythmically off the bed, like he can reach out and finger the feathers. He reaches, and they are soft in places, coarse in others, and Cas stutters against his chin whenever he touches them, stiff and sharp and silky over Dean’s belly and throat and face, his lips, and he shudders, clenches, rides and rides it until he has no idea if he’s even on a bed anymore, but he knows he’s safe, and that Cas has not once left him. Cas will never leave him.

**

He wakes, panting and sticky with sweat, hands clutching for a body that’s not there. He is a trembling mess, hot and sick and whole all at once. The smell of Cas is in his room, ghosting his nostrils. He squeezes his eyes shut. He feels the phantom touch of wings again and he arches up off the bed, and he can’t breathe.

“It’ll be better,” he chokes when it passes, glad of thick walls and thicker darkness. The bunker sleeps on.

It’ll be better. When they finish this. It has to be.

**

Killing God without killing God. Killing his hope instead. His dreams, if he has any. In Dean’s opinion, it’s a far better death. It fits the crime, leaves the criminal to suffer. It introduces hell in so many shades, one after another after another. Most importantly, it leaves behind the hell of hells: the what if.

_What if I had changed the plot? What if I had been kinder to my sons, done things a little differently?_

**

_What if, when asked, at the end… I had answered?_

**

“Cas,” he says one night, to musty, dry walls. It’s been sixty-eight days and nineteen hours since they stripped God of his power. Dean drinks from his fourth bottle and doesn’t taste a thing. 

“Cas. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t answer.”

He couldn’t have done anything else. He knows it. He thinks Cas might have known it, might have counted on it, if Cas had been counting on anything. Somehow, though, that rings false. Something in Cas’s smile that day, something that said, _I’m winging this and I’m so scared, but not scared that it won’t save you._ “I still don’t get it sometimes. All I see is me. The me that I know, anyway. I try to see the me you saw. I try a little every day, and some days… Some days I see you. Very differently.”

Dean takes a gulp of his beer and wipes his mouth, and rubs the flaming in his cheeks. _Very_ differently.

“I want you back, man.” That’s a truth that drags tears back up his throat. He drinks too much now and he sleeps too little, and he wants to weep like a baby, and still, no one is listening. 

“I don’t know how to apologize for what I… what it did to you. Caring for me has never been good for anyone, not really. It figures, that the people who care the most are always the ones who—”

It’s been sixty-eight days, nineteen hours, and he still can’t manage that word. 

“I wish you hadn’t, man.” It’s useless. Cas saved him and they thwarted God, and all’s well that ends well. He knows that in Cas’s mind, there was never a question of the right thing to do. But he still frustratingly _wishes._

“I love you.” It’s clogged with the mess in his nose and lodged behind his eyes. He’s had sixty-eight days and nineteen hours to turn it over and smooth its edges, to dig under it to the foundation below the rest. Bodies, breaths and lips and hands and sweat, it all pales in the face of the soul-deep understanding. “You _know_ I love you. Hell, Cas, I’d do anything you ask.”

The loss is the hell. The silence that sat in his own throat as it all slid away from him. He is Dean Winchester, fatalistic and walled in, and his own fiercest guard dog—sometimes his own fiercest enemy.

“I’m… me, and I’m sorry, and I miss you.”

**

Cas returns in a blink, no flash of light or rumble of thunder. One moment he’s not, and the next moment, Jack snaps, and he _is._

It’s hard to look, as though Dean were gazing upon Castiel’s true form. It’s harder not to look, to face the idea that when he looks back, Cas will no longer be there.

“Dean,” Cas says, and stops, even though Sam is there, even though Eileen and Jody are there, even though Jack is there. Dean has no idea if he’s an angel, has no idea if he’s human. Only one term about any of this was clear.

Cas stands, small and bewildered in the sunlight, staring straight across at Dean, and there is _nothing_ shielding what’s inside now, just wide, open blue eyes. 

Four steps. A distance of nothing.

Dean surges around him, face in Cas’s throat, grabbing hold and squeezing hard enough to bend ribs.

And maybe he still doesn’t know what to do with thoughts and sex yet, exactly, the enormity, the heaving shift and reassembling in his guts, but Cas smells like canvas, ozone, darkness, and he sounds like grumpy fluorescents over kitchen sinks, and he _feels_ like dusty books, long tiled hallways, bedrooms with oaken doors, late nights awake over tomes, a thousand miles rumbling under the Impala’s wheels, a thousand indrawn breaths—and Dean knows just as surely as if he’d looked into the future that he will get there. That he’ll go—he’s going—gladly.

He leans back, braces Cas’s face with one hand at his nape and one tight on his shoulder. Gives him a shake.

“Give me a minute this time, okay?” He can’t stop the tears. He can’t stop smiling.

And Cas’s eyes finally shed their endless, ageless weight. He smiles back, watery in bright sunlight, laughs out a sigh, and Dean kisses his forehead long and hard. Dean breathes him in.

**

The world without God is still a hard, cruel place. There are still monsters to fight. People are people, and they still do hard, cruel things.

But loving Cas? That’s easy.

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to previous fics in this fandom by other people for some of the ideas in this story, particularly of sex including angel wings (hot damn), and of course interpretation-bleed for Dean's reaction after That Scene. Gawd, I love these characters.


End file.
